I loved Divinity:OS/2 and figured if BG3 was even half as good, it would be worth the money. Waited until it was out of Early Access, then bought it. Worth every euro. And the soundtrack is a masterpiece! Not that I expected any different.
Played it a little bit (up to the goblin fort part), was pretty neat. Fights take a long ass time to resolve, but you can get pretty creative with them.
Now, this might be a personal thing, but the game somehow doesn’t really have that fantasy feel? It’s like playing Mass Effect with a fantasy paint coating over it, rather than playing an actual fantasy game. I hope I’m making sense here, lol. From my point of view, a work of fiction with a good fantasy atmosphere is all about that personal tranquil, solemn journey rather than bombastic adventures, romance or whatever. It’s the kind of mood that you get while listening to dungeon synth – a genre directly inspired by classic fantasy. Lunacid is a good example of what I am talking about.
Another point of contention for me is the disk size of the game. Now that I have more of disk space available to me, I could give it another chance, though
I always get the feeling that D&D’s Forgotten Realms is a more goofy kind of fantasy, like everything you want is possible. It’s about imagination and self-expression, rather than setting strict rules for how things work. Makes sense imo, they want it to be the world that you use to create your own stories for P&P games, so it should have many different facets and can’t be too limiting.
I think the biggest draw toward BG3 is the replay-ability!
I think I had 200+ hr on my first play through, but I made decisions, that I won’t say for spoiler reasons, that cut off multiple entire story lines that I have read are another ~80hrs + of playtime! Super cool, in my opinion.
The players actions CHANGE the world, many games have strived for this, although few have achieved. BG3 achieved!
I had completely discounted ever playing a story-driven game like an RPG in early access. And now I've played BG3, and I know there's enough systemic nonsense that I'll be lined up for day 1 of their early access for their next game.
It deserves it. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s a hell of a good one and it is incredibly satisfying to play.
My biggest gripe is that save scumming often feels absolutely necessary because you’ll unknowingly get yourself into situations that you just can’t push through without reloading or your whole party dying.
A good DM knows that games are most fun when the party barely scrapes by, but doesn’t die until the end game. If they could have implemented some sort of dynamic difficulty that adjusted background rolls and enemy decisions to keep the player pushing forward, it would have felt much more satisfying.
I agree about the same scrumming. Particularly in the beginning when I had low level characters, I would think I was being clever and bypass some section only to accidentally wander into a a bunch of hostiles that far outnumbered my group and repeatedly get massacred.
Dynamic difficulty feels cheap to me, and I imagine it does for the developers too, which is why they give you nearly perfect information in a way that a DM probably never would. When I played the RE2 remake, the one mod I wanted was one that would turn off dynamic difficulty; that mod would eventually exist, but after I had long since finished the game. At the time, there was little else besides mods that enhanced Claire's wet t-shirt physics.
It definitely has plenty of flaws, but the good things heavily outweigh the bad.
I mean just the shear scope of that game is crazy. It’s very ambitious .There are so many dialog options. I’ve tried to explore as much as I can in my first playthrough but I can tell there’s a lot of content that I’ve missed.
I think that’s one of the biggest complaints people have had of the dialogue system. It’s really annoying to have a person in your party who could nail the conversations, but not be able to use them.
Especially when you walk into a conversation with a person specifically interested in one of your party members, but that specific member just has to stand there silent.
As much as I agree with your opinion on save scumming, truth is all of the Infinity Engine games were like this as well. Even if you’re a seasoned D&D player, it’s all too easy to get completely wiped in the dungeon at the beginning of BG2 to an imp because barely any of your party’s attack rolls are successful at Lvl 1.
Balders Gate 2 was developed by Bioware and published by Interplay. That’s not to say Larian couldn’t have learned from it anyway, but it’s not a lesson they would have learned from experience.
It’s not fudging roles, it’s making NPC decisions that help keep the game moving forward.
A party of actual players would not be very happy with a DM that killed everyone in the first two hours of playing. Which is exactly what happened when I played BG3. Quickly taught me to save often and reload when I realize I’m completely losing a fight.
Agreed. This is one of those situations where I actually want to vote with my wallet if I can. They made a stellar game, it want them to make a shitload of money. That’s the only way we’re going to get another game of BG3 quality.
It’s worth it full price. On GOG. Play it with a 4 player party on one copy. Then buy more copies once there is a sale / once you want to support the devs.
This really is one of those games that’s worth it at full price. Save waiting on a sale for the half-finished games that shouldn’t be priced as high as they are.
Don’t tell the forums that, they’re convinced it’s an unplayable woke government ops pathetic remake zoophilia kissing simulator insult to d&d. It’s got so many bugs you can’t play it on anything short of a super computer, and is targeting children with it’s addicting gameplay and low system requirements.
Every day there’s a new 3 page screed expanding each of the above adjectives into paragraphs of garbage. Yet somehow most of the authors don’t own the game, and it’s has a overwhelmingly positive rating…
I mean, my partner and I actually did stop our play through because it was too buggy and it was effecting our enjoyment. Been meaning to get back to it after all the patches, but like... It was pretty buggy around launch by my standards.
I love BG3 as a video game, but I feel like Hasbro is going to take a lot of the ideas and try their best to translate them into the trrpg space and shittify both on the way through.
Don’t tell the forums that, they’re convinced it’s an unplayable woke government ops
This is far too many Steam forums lately, and I don't know why or what hurt these people. If you ask the Steam forums, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League failed because it went woke and hired some diversity consultancy firm that only these people know the name of and hold up as the antichrist.
You mean to say that you didn’t already know what Sweet Baby Inc. really weird name by the way is before some chuds declared them to be the biggest bad influence to human culture?
Right. I'm afraid to start googling for the answer, but I suspect there's an Alex Jones type, or the equivalent that cares about video games, basically painting them as the George Soros of video games.
You don’t leave a detailed review unless you want to support the artist in question or you fucking hated it so much that you would take the time to warn others away or you want to be intentionally confrontational and act like a troll. In a huge game like bg3 or Suicide Squad the artist support is fractured at best so all your left with is the bile
These aren't the reviews, they're the forums. Used to be you could ask a question and get an answer from a fan or often times the developers. Now it's just people crying about games being "woke", as though that word actually means anything anymore, even in a game as near-universally beloved as BG3. But you can find the same thing happening in Starfield, Suicide Squad, or even Skullgirls.
Act 3 is pretty janky at times and they seriously need to give you vertical camera controls (xcom figured this out like 15 years ago!) but it’s still a fantastic game. Lots of valid critiques, but still a great game
If you’re in a multi-story fight (very frequent in act 3 in particular) there is no way to force the camera and cursor up/down a story. You have to physically travel with the cursor and pray it doesn’t freak out OR click on pictures in the turn order and hope the pathing can figure it out on its own (which it often can’t).
Well bg3 allows and encourages several saves, so if you have put 100 hours into it and then lose your only save slot - which doesn’t make sense to me because it also auto saves independent of your manual saves - then ultimately, I blame user error. Especially since the bug was so limited.
That doesn’t make sense to me either, how so many people were heartbroken when all they had to do was simply load an auto save. I can’t confirm because I just didn’t give them money until it worked properly.
TBH it’s really not that surprising, just classic gatekeeping - cRPGs were very niche for a long time and those people dislike the fact many new people are suddenly interested in them because of this game.
I kinda get it in a way, I think some other games in the genre deserve this success more, but at the end of the day it’s still better than most of the shit released lately.
Got any examples? I’ve been a crpg fan since my teens, but there’s so many I haven’t tried. Any game that deserve success more than bg3 is a game I should probably give a shot!
I think Pillars of Eternity is way better than BG3 - I prefer its combat, story, writing and art style. It’s also a very big game, fairly similar to BG3 I think. It also has a sequel which I haven’t played yet.
I just played through Pillars of Eternity, and though it's very good, I don't think it's even close to BG3. So many times there appeared to be a way to talk your way out of a thing, only for the NPC to decide that it can only be resolved via combat, and there was so much combat that it became exhausting. Your party would start taking damage that they shouldn't have just because you're advancing combat faster than you should out of decision fatigue. Even with liberal auto pause settings, 15 different events could trigger in combat in the blink of an eye, and it's very easy to miss what even happened. Leveling up most classes has minimal depth, and the way priests and druids in particular gain new spells is far less elegant than 5e's "upcasting".
For all those gripes, I still enjoyed it. And in the first 5 hours of Pillars of Eternity II, nearly all of those complaints are well addressed. Even with the vast improvement in the sequel thus far, I'd still say not only the production value of Baldur's Gate 3 is better but BG3 inherently benefits from the systemic framework Larian's had for about a decade now, allowing you to come up with creative solutions to problems. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I think it's a hard sell to say Pillars is more deserving of that success.
I can respect the first paragraph, even though I disagree (it honestly just sounds like you prefer turn-based combat, which is fine but not an issue with the game). The other points apply to many cRPGs (combat is part of the game, even games like Planescape have unaviodable combat). Levelling is worse in Pillars though, I agree.
The second paragraph doesn’t really say anything though - Obsidian have also been making cRPGs for a long time, and Pillars is full of intersting solutions for problems. Honestly it’s very hard for me to say which game is better in this regard.
All in all these complaints (even if I completely agreed) do not lead me to the conclusion that “I don’t think it’s even close to BG3.” The only thing “not even close” between those games is how much they cost to make (which IMO makes some of BG3’s issues, like launch bugs and the state of the third act, much less acceptable).
Combat is part of the game, and unavoidable combat at times is part of that too, but the option to do anything else was just so rare in Pillars 1. I do prefer turn-based combat, but RTWP is made more manageable when the information is more readable. Pillars 2, for instance, color codes all sorts of stuff in your combat log and zooms in on events like enemy kills. Those two things alone make it much easier to parse what's happening compared to its predecessor. And the amount of combat in Pillars 1, while it may be similar to Baldur's Gate 1 and, at times, BG2, still suffers from the same things those games do. If you're sitting at a tabletop setting and getting through a combat encounter, you'd probably feel like your DM was lazy if they just threw 4-6 trash mobs at you in between finding points of interest in a dungeon; it doesn't make for the best pacing. Again, Pillars 1 was very good, but it's also very restricted by comparison.
Well you managed to convince me to finally play Pillars 2. I actually don’t mind the chaotic nature of RTWP (kinda makes me feel like it’s a real fight, in a way) but zooming in on events to effectively relay info is very clever.
I have unfortunately never had the chance to play D&D (only ever had one friend who was interested), so I compare cRPGs to other video games, where having shitty enemies between points of interest is pretty much expected.
But I understand what you mean by it being more restricted. Still liked it better though, honestly in large part because I think the writing and story are much better (very subjective though).
Did you finish BG3? The plot is very by-the-numbers, but the characters' stories weaving in and out of it was the main event in that game, and lots of those reach their conclusions in Act 3. In Pillars 1, the problem I had with the party members' stories were that they all felt like the beginning of a storyline instead of a complete arc, but a friend of mine who's finished Pillars 2 tells me that they deliver on this front much better in the sequel.
One word of warning to you on Pillars 2, since you think so highly of the combat in Pillars 1, is that part of the reason it might be more readable this time around is that battles are smaller-scale, by a smidge. Your party size is restricted to 5 instead 6, and I'm assuming that enemy mobs as the game goes on will scale down proportionally compared to Pillars 1. But skill checks in dialogue to solve problems by means other than combat? Character build depth? Environment readability, conveying the approximate level of the quests in your journal, the inconvenience of managing your stronghold while you're out adventuring...I think the developers agreed with me on all of my complaints with the first game, because what I've seen of the early hours of this game is an answer to all of it.
I have unfortunately never had the chance to play D&D (only ever had one friend who was interested), so I compare cRPGs to other video games, where having shitty enemies between points of interest is pretty much expected.
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